The way I've noted that _should_ work (I haven't made it fully work yet).

Pulseaudio allows you to stream data out via DNLA and Airplay, both of which the MDs support, to an extent.

I've had music from desktop spotify play via an airplay stream to an MD, although no, actual, sound came out, both ends recognised each other and connected to each other.I haven't investigated further, but that might be a possibility.The other one would be to integrate pulse audio into an MD as another audio server option alongside an airplay server, as pulse audio network playing is pretty solid in my experience.

but your mission does not make sense to me. If you are running a MD that means your core is up too. If the core/MD is the same machine, then ideally your media should be on it. why would you run two or three machines to listen to music?

Or am I missing something here?

If it is other way , i.e. you are trying to stream music from your core to any pc in the home.. should make more sense. A possible solution is, Lmce by default hosts mediatomb upnp server (not fully functional though) that will allow your media play on any machine.

The way I've noted that _should_ work (I haven't made it fully work yet).

Pulseaudio allows you to stream data out via DNLA and Airplay, both of which the MDs support, to an extent.

I've had music from desktop spotify play via an airplay stream to an MD, although no, actual, sound came out, both ends recognised each other and connected to each other.I haven't investigated further, but that might be a possibility.The other one would be to integrate pulse audio into an MD as another audio server option alongside an airplay server, as pulse audio network playing is pretty solid in my experience.

it can do WHAT!!?>!>!>

sometimes, i lament being in Qt / QML world day an night. So many other technologies and so little time...-golgoj4

Install paprefs and run it, there is then an option to "Make discoverable Apple Airtunes sound devices available locally"

That then shows up in the main pulse control tool as an option to direct audio streams to (per app!). Pulse is really quite a nice bit of kit, streaming between pulse servers works well, this appears to work less well, but I don't know where the problem lies at all.